OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Is Hierarchical Quantization Essential for Optimal Reconstruction?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are central to models that rely on high reconstruction fidelity, from neural compression to generative pipelines. Hierarchical extensions, such as VQ-VAE2, are often credited with superior reconstruction performance because they split global and local features across multiple levels. However, since higher levels derive all their information from lower levels, they should not carry additional reconstructive content beyond what the lower-level already encodes. Combined with recent advances in training objectives and quantization mechanisms, this leads us to ask whether a single-level VQ-VAE, with matched representational budget and no codebook collapse, can equal the reconstruction fidelity of its hierarchical counterpart. Although the multi-scale structure of hierarchical models may improve perceptual quality in downstream tasks, the effect of hierarchy on reconstruction accuracy, isolated from codebook utilization and overall representational capacity, remains empirically underexamined. We revisit this question by comparing a two-level VQ-VAE and a capacity-matched single-level model on high-resolution ImageNet images. Consistent with prior observations, we confirm that inadequate codebook utilization limits single-level VQ-VAEs and that overly high-dimensional embeddings destabilize quantization and increase codebook collapse. We show that lightweight interventions such as initialization from data, periodic reset of inactive codebook vectors, and systematic tuning of codebook hyperparameters significantly reduce collapse. Our results demonstrate that when representational budgets are matched, and codebook collapse is mitigated, single-level VQ-VAEs can match the reconstruction fidelity of hierarchical variants, challenging the assumption that hierarchical quantization is inherently superior for high-quality reconstructions.
Gaussian Process Bandit Optimization with Machine Learning Predictions and Application to Hypothesis Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Many real-world optimization problems involve an expensive ground-truth oracle (e.g., human evaluation, physical experiments) and a cheap, low-fidelity prediction oracle (e.g., machine learning models, simulations). Meanwhile, abundant offline data (e.g., past experiments and predictions) are often available and can be used to pretrain powerful predictive models, as well as to provide an informative prior. We propose Prediction-Augmented Gaussian Process Upper Confidence Bound (PA-GP-UCB), a novel Bayesian optimization algorithm that leverages both oracles and offline data to achieve provable gains in sample efficiency for the ground-truth oracle queries. PA-GP-UCB employs a control-variates estimator derived from a joint Gaussian process posterior to correct prediction bias and reduce uncertainty. We prove that PA-GP-UCB preserves the standard regret rate of GP-UCB while achieving a strictly smaller leading constant that is explicitly controlled by prediction quality and offline data coverage. Empirically, PA-GP-UCB converges faster than Vanilla GP-UCB and naive prediction-augmented GP-UCB baselines on synthetic benchmarks and on a real-world hypothesis evaluation task grounded in human behavioral data, where predictions are provided by large language models. These results establish PA-GP-UCB as a general and sample-efficient framework for hypothesis generation under expensive feedback.
Label-Efficient Monitoring of Classification Models via Stratified Importance Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Monitoring the performance of classification models in production is critical yet challenging due to strict labeling budgets, one-shot batch acquisition of labels and extremely low error rates. We propose a general framework based on Stratified Importance Sampling (SIS) that directly addresses these constraints in model monitoring. While SIS has previously been applied in specialized domains, our theoretical analysis establishes its broad applicability to the monitoring of classification models. Under mild conditions, SIS yields unbiased estimators with strict finite-sample mean squared error (MSE) improvements over both importance sampling (IS) and stratified random sampling (SRS). The framework does not rely on optimally defined proposal distributions or strata: even with noisy proxies and sub-optimal stratification, SIS can improve estimator efficiency compared to IS or SRS individually, though extreme proposal mismatch may limit these gains. Experiments across binary and multiclass tasks demonstrate consistent efficiency improvements under fixed label budgets, underscoring SIS as a principled, label-efficient, and operationally lightweight methodology for post-deployment model monitoring.
Molecular Representations in Implicit Functional Space via Hyper-Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Molecular representations fundamentally shape how machine learning systems reason about molecular structure and physical properties. Most existing approaches adopt a discrete pipeline: molecules are encoded as sequences, graphs, or point clouds, mapped to fixed-dimensional embeddings, and then used for task-specific prediction. This paradigm treats molecules as discrete objects, despite their intrinsically continuous and field-like physical nature. We argue that molecular learning can instead be formulated as learning in function space. Specifically, we model each molecule as a continuous function over three-dimensional (3D) space and treat this molecular field as the primary object of representation. From this perspective, conventional molecular representations arise as particular sampling schemes of an underlying continuous object. We instantiate this formulation with MolField, a hyper-network-based framework that learns distributions over molecular fields. To ensure physical consistency, these functions are defined over canonicalized coordinates, yielding invariance to global SE(3) transformations. To enable learning directly over functions, we introduce a structured weight tokenization and train a sequence-based hyper-network to model a shared prior over molecular fields. We evaluate MolField on molecular dynamics and property prediction. Our results show that treating molecules as continuous functions fundamentally changes how molecular representations generalize across tasks and yields downstream behavior that is stable to how molecules are discretized or queried.
Sparks of Rationality: Do Reasoning LLMs Align with Human Judgment and Choice?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly positioned as decision engines for hiring, healthcare, and economic judgment, yet real-world human judgment reflects a balance between rational deliberation and emotion-driven bias. If LLMs are to participate in high-stakes decisions or serve as models of human behavior, it is critical to assess whether they exhibit analogous patterns of (ir)rationalities and biases. To this end, we evaluate multiple LLM families on (i) benchmarks testing core axioms of rational choice and (ii) classic decision domains from behavioral economics and social norms where emotions are known to shape judgment and choice. Across settings, we show that deliberate "thinking" reliably improves rationality and pushes models toward expected-value maximization. To probe human-like affective distortions and their interaction with reasoning, we use two emotion-steering methods: in-context priming (ICP) and representation-level steering (RLS). ICP induces strong directional shifts that are often extreme and difficult to calibrate, whereas RLS produces more psychologically plausible patterns but with lower reliability. Our results suggest that the same mechanisms that improve rationality also amplify sensitivity to affective interventions, and that different steering methods trade off controllability against human-aligned behavior. Overall, this points to a tension between reasoning and affective steering, with implications for both human simulation and the safe deployment of LLM-based decision systems.
Learning Policy Representations for Steerable Behavior Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Given a Markov decision process (MDP), we seek to learn representations for a range of policies to facilitate behavior steering at test time. As policies of an MDP are uniquely determined by their occupancy measures, we propose modeling policy representations as expectations of state-action feature maps with respect to occupancy measures. We show that these representations can be approximated uniformly for a range of policies using a set-based architecture. Our model encodes a set of state-action samples into a latent embedding, from which we decode both the policy and its value functions corresponding to multiple rewards. We use variational generative approach to induce a smooth latent space, and further shape it with contrastive learning so that latent distances align with differences in value functions. This geometry permits gradient-based optimization directly in the latent space. Leveraging this capability, we solve a novel behavior synthesis task, where policies are steered to satisfy previously unseen value function constraints without additional training.
Small Talk, Big Impact: The Energy Cost of Thanking AI
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Being polite is free - or is it? In this paper, we quantify the energy cost of seemingly innocuous messages such as ``thank you'' when interacting with large language models, often used by users to convey politeness. Using real-world conversation traces and fine-grained energy measurements, we quantify how input length, output length and model size affect energy use. While politeness is our motivating example, it also serves as a controlled and reproducible proxy for measuring the energy footprint of a typical LLM interaction. Our findings provide actionable insights for building more sustainable and efficient LLM applications, especially in increasingly widespread real-world contexts like chat. As user adoption grows and billions of prompts are processed daily, understanding and mitigating this cost becomes crucial - not just for efficiency, but for sustainable AI deployment.
Context Structure Reshapes the Representational Geometry of Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to organize the representations of input sequences into straighter neural trajectories in their deep layers, which has been hypothesized to facilitate next-token prediction via linear extrapolation. Language models can also adapt to diverse tasks and learn new structure in context, and recent work has shown that this in-context learning (ICL) can be reflected in representational changes. Here we bring these two lines of research together to explore whether representation straightening occurs \emph{within} a context during ICL. We measure representational straightening in Gemma 2 models across a diverse set of in-context tasks, and uncover a dichotomy in how LLMs' representations change in context. In continual prediction settings (e.g., natural language, grid world traversal tasks) we observe that increasing context increases the straightness of neural sequence trajectories, which is correlated with improvement in model prediction. Conversely, in structured prediction settings (e.g., few-shot tasks), straightening is inconsistent -- it is only present in phases of the task with explicit structure (e.g., repeating a template), but vanishes elsewhere. These results suggest that ICL is not a monolithic process. Instead, we propose that LLMs function like a Swiss Army knife: depending on task structure, the LLM dynamically selects between strategies, only some of which yield representational straightening.
Lantern: A Minimalist Robotic Object Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Robotic objects are simple actuated systems that subtly blend into human environments. We design and introduce Lantern, a minimalist robotic object platform to enable building simple robotic artifacts. We conducted in-depth design and engineering iterations of Lantern's mechatronic architecture to meet specific design goals while maintaining a low build cost (~40 USD). As an extendable, open-source platform, Lantern aims to enable exploration of a range of HRI scenarios by leveraging human tendency to assign social meaning to simple forms. To evaluate Lantern's potential for HRI, we conducted a series of explorations: 1) a co-design workshop, 2) a sensory room case study, 3) distribution to external HRI labs, 4) integration into a graduate-level HRI course, and 5) public exhibitions with older adults and children. Our findings show that Lantern effectively evokes engagement, can support versatile applications ranging from emotion regulation to focused work, and serves as a viable platform for lowering barriers to HRI as a field.
SP^2DPO: An LLM-assisted Semantic Per-Pair DPO Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) controls the trade-off between fitting preference labels and staying close to a reference model using a single global temperature beta, implicitly treating all preference pairs as equally informative. Real-world preference corpora are heterogeneous: they mix high-signal, objective failures (for example, safety, factuality, instruction violations) with low-signal or subjective distinctions (for example, style), and also include label noise. We introduce our method, SP2DPO (Semantic Per-Pair DPO), a generalization that replaces the global temperature with an instance-specific schedule beta_i pre-decided offline from structured semantic-gap annotations (category, magnitude, confidence) produced by teacher language models. We instantiate this procedure on the UltraFeedback preference corpus (59,960 pairs), enabling large-scale construction of an auditable beta_i artifact, and incur zero training-time overhead: the inner-loop optimizer remains standard DPO with beta set per pair. We focus our empirical study on AlpacaEval 2.0, reporting both raw win rate and length-controlled win rate. Across four open-weight, instruction-tuned student backbones (4B-8B), SP2DPO is competitive with a tuned global-beta DPO baseline and improves AlpacaEval 2.0 length-controlled win rate on two of four backbones, while avoiding per-model beta sweeps. All code, annotations, and artifacts will be released.
SAIR: Cost-Efficient Multi-Stage ML Pipeline Autoscaling via In-Context Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Multi-stage ML inference pipelines are difficult to autoscale due to heterogeneous resources, cross-stage coupling, and dynamic bottleneck migration. We present SAIR, an autoscaling framework that uses an LLM as an in-context reinforcement learning controller, improving its policy online from reward-labeled interaction histories without gradient updates. SAIR combines Pareto-dominance reward shaping with a provable separation margin, surprisal-guided experience retrieval for context efficiency, and fine-grained GPU rate control via user-space CUDA interception. We provide regret analysis decomposing error into retrieval coverage and LLM selection components. On four ML serving pipelines under three workload patterns, SAIR achieves the best or tied-best P99 latency and effective resource cost among deployed baselines, improving P99 by up to 50% and reducing effective cost by up to 97% (under GPU rate-control assumptions), with 86% bottleneck detection accuracy and no offline training.
MetaLead: A Comprehensive Human-Curated Leaderboard Dataset for Transparent Reporting of Machine Learning Experiments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Leaderboards are crucial in the machine learning (ML) domain for benchmarking and tracking progress. However, creating leaderboards traditionally demands significant manual effort. In recent years, efforts have been made to automate leaderboard generation, but existing datasets for this purpose are limited by capturing only the best results from each paper and limited metadata. We present MetaLead, a fully human-annotated ML Leaderboard dataset that captures all experimental results for result transparency and contains extra metadata, such as the result experimental type: baseline, proposed method, or variation of proposed method for experiment-type guided comparisons, and explicitly separates train and test dataset for cross-domain assessment. This enriched structure makes MetaLead a powerful resource for more transparent and nuanced evaluations across ML research.
High-Definition 5MP Stereo Vision Sensing for Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

High-resolution (5MP+) stereo vision systems are essential for advancing robotic capabilities, enabling operation over longer ranges and generating significantly denser and accurate 3D point clouds. However, realizing the full potential of high-angular-resolution sensors requires a commensurately higher level of calibration accuracy and faster processing -- requirements often unmet by conventional methods. This study addresses that critical gap by processing 5MP camera imagery using a novel, advanced frame-to-frame calibration and stereo matching methodology designed to achieve both high accuracy and speed. Furthermore, we introduce a new approach to evaluate real-time performance by comparing real-time disparity maps with ground-truth disparity maps derived from more computationally intensive stereo matching algorithms. Crucially, the research demonstrates that high-pixel-count cameras yield high-quality point clouds only through the implementation of high-accuracy calibration.
Toward Non-Expert Customized Congestion Control
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

General-purpose congestion control algorithms (CCAs) are designed to achieve general congestion control goals, but they may not meet the specific requirements of certain users. Customized CCAs can meet certain users' specific requirements; however, non-expert users often lack the expertise to implement them. In this paper, we present an exploratory non-expert customized CCA framework, named NECC, which enables non-expert users to easily model, implement, and deploy their customized CCAs by leveraging Large Language Models and the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) interface. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address the customized CCA implementation problem. Our evaluations using real-world CCAs show that the performance of NECC is very promising, and we discuss the insights that we find and possible future research directions.
Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Extended Reed-Solomon Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2026
Year: 2026

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are an important class of non-binary error-correction codes. They are particularly competent in correcting burst errors, being widely applied in modern communications and data storage systems. This also thanks to their distance property of reaching the Singleton bound, being the maximum distance separable (MDS) codes. This paper proposes a new list decoding for extended RS (eRS) codes defined over a finite field of characteristic two, i.e., F_{2^n}. It is developed based on transforming an eRS code into n binary polar codes. Consequently, it can be decoded by the successive cancellation (SC) decoding and further their list decoding, i.e., the SCL decoding. A pre-transformed matrix is required for reinterpretating the eRS codes, which also determines their SC and SCL decoding performances. Its column linear independence property is studied, leading to theoretical characterization of their SC decoding performance. Our proposed decoding and analysis are validated numerically.
Mitigating Cognitive Inertia in Large Reasoning Models via Latent Spike Steering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance by scaling test-time compute, they frequently suffer from Cognitive Inertia, a failure pattern manifesting as either overthinking (inertia of motion) or reasoning rigidity (inertia of direction). Existing detection methods, typically relying on superficial textual heuristics like self-correction tokens, often fail to capture the model's unvoiced internal conflicts. To address this, we propose STARS (Spike-Triggered Adaptive Reasoning Steering), a training-free framework designed to rectify cognitive inertia by monitoring latent dynamics. STARS identifies Cognitive Pivots-critical moments of reasoning transition-by detecting distinct L2 distance spikes in the hidden states. Upon detection, the framework employs geometric trajectory analysis to diagnose the structural nature of the transition and injects state-aware language cues to steer the model in real-time. Our experiments across diverse benchmarks confirm that STARS efficiently curtails redundant loops while improving accuracy through the adaptive correction of erroneous trajectories. STARS offers a robust, unsupervised mechanism to optimize the reasoning process of LRMs without requiring additional fine-tuning.
FITMM: Adaptive Frequency-Aware Multimodal Recommendation via Information-Theoretic Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Multimodal recommendation aims to enhance user preference modeling by leveraging rich item content such as images and text. Yet dominant systems fuse modalities in the spatial domain, obscuring the frequency structure of signals and amplifying misalignment and redundancy. We adopt a spectral information-theoretic view and show that, under an orthogonal transform that approximately block-diagonalizes bandwise covariances, the Gaussian Information Bottleneck objective decouples across frequency bands, providing a principled basis for separate-then-fuse paradigm. Building on this foundation, we propose FITMM, a Frequency-aware Information-Theoretic framework for multimodal recommendation. FITMM constructs graph-enhanced item representations, performs modality-wise spectral decomposition to obtain orthogonal bands, and forms lightweight within-band multimodal components. A residual, task-adaptive gate aggregates bands into the final representation. To control redundancy and improve generalization, we regularize training with a frequency-domain IB term that allocates capacity across bands (Wiener-like shrinkage with shut-off of weak bands). We further introduce a cross-modal spectral consistency loss that aligns modalities within each band. The model is jointly optimized with the standard recommendation loss. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FITMM consistently and significantly outperforms advanced baselines.
Mock Worlds, Real Skills: Building Small Agentic Language Models with Synthetic Tasks, Simulated Environments, and Rubric-Based Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Small LLMs often struggle to match the agentic capabilities of large, costly models. While reinforcement learning can help, progress has been limited by two structural bottlenecks: existing open-source agentic training data are narrow in task variety and easily solved; real-world APIs lack diversity and are unstable for large-scale reinforcement learning rollout processes. We address these challenges with SYNTHAGENT, a framework that jointly synthesizes diverse tool-use training data and simulates complete environments. Specifically, a strong teacher model creates novel tasks and tool ecosystems, then rewrites them into intentionally underspecified instructions. This compels agents to actively query users for missing details. When handling synthetic tasks, an LLM-based user simulator provides user-private information, while a mock tool system delivers stable tool responses. For rewards, task-level rubrics are constructed based on required subgoals, user-agent interactions, and forbidden behaviors. Across 14 challenging datasets in math, search, and tool use, models trained on our synthetic data achieve substantial gains, with small models outperforming larger baselines.